The Lone Sysadmin

My first Mardi Gras experience was a blast. I owe a huge debt to Maitri and Derick for hosting me, and prodding me to head down and be a part of everything (parades, hanging with their friends, parties with their coworkers, etc.).

I also owe the Krewe of King Arthur thanks. It’s an amazing group, and diverse, which not all Krewes can claim. If there’s a spot available next year I could probably be convinced to ride again with almost no effort. Back in November Derick told me that I’d spend a bunch of money to buy a ton of cheap plastic stuff to throw to people I don’t even know, and I’d love it. He was right. Turning the corner into the parade route and having hundreds of people yelling and waving for beads is a real trip. It’s a blast making people smile by throwing them something, from kids to grandparents. To all the people who said thanks, or gave me a thumbs-up, or especially a big smile after I threw them something, I say “you’re welcome.”

As for places to go, food to eat, stuff to drink, I partook in:

• Juan’s Flying Burrito. A creole taqueria? What? Their burritos are messy but good (necessarily finger-licking good), and the staff is incredibly friendly. I also met Michael Dingler there and learned about his plight versus the “Grey Ghost,” a city-sanctioned painter who defaces private property to cover up graffiti. What a bunch of B.S., and I hope reason prevails.
• Slice, a pizzeria on St. Charles. I ate there twice (it was convenient), both times having the Trucker calzone. Pretty tasty. Who knew ground trucker was so good?
• Fahy’s, a bar in the French Quarter. I’ve been introduced to many of the locals there and it’s fun to hang out with a friendly crowd. I successfully avoided Mind Erasers this trip (tasty but deadly). w00t!
• The Abbey, another bar in the Quarter. I didn’t have a drink but did get a new beer drinking t-shirt (to complement my “Drunk Bob No Pants” shirt). This one features the phrase “Repent You F***ing Savages, Repent!” How could you go wrong with something like that? It’ll probably look nice with my camo shorts.
• Dante’s Kitchen. Their menu mentions that cell phones and diets should be left at the door. Two words: hell yeah. If you go get the barbecue shrimp appetizer, and extra bread to dip in it.
• Central Grocery, for their muffulettas. Derick picked up two muffulettas on Saturday to eat Sunday while we were waiting to roll in the parade. They’re the size of dinner plates, and they get better with age. Mmm mmm mmm.
• Landry’s Seafood House, still serves their shrimp embrochette, and I still love eating it. Can’t argue with shrimp stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon.

No rider in the Krewe of King Arthur can be without a costume and something on their face. Rather than face paint I opted to get a mask, and I velcroed it to my sunglasses for the ride. My mask came from New Orleans Madness Masks, purchased from Jim himself, made locally by him and his colleague Conway. He helped me try a whole bunch on and had good advice for me, with no pressure to get anything I didn’t absolutely like. Since it was my first one and I was unsure about my glasses I went for the low-end ($30, but they go into the $200s), but with a little more planning I would probably get a fancier one.

I like the effect with my sunglasses underneath. My costume is sort of sci-fi meets demented clown:

More of my photos are up on Flickr. In the end I had a great time. If you ever get the opportunity to go to Mardi Gras, and especially if you can ride with a Krewe, I wholeheartedly suggest it.

Need a serial console on your Linux box, just in case something happens to the network? Yeah, me too. It’s fairly simple to get it running (at least on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4), if you have the right steps.

This is not an in-depth tutorial on serial consoles, it’s just designed to get you moving faster. I assume you know how to install packages, edit files, etc., or are at least resourceful enough to figure it out. I also assume you’re s-m-r-t enough to try this on a machine you can get to easily, if you mess it up the first time.

On newer machines there are often BIOS serial redirection options, too, which might be useful. Conveniently, check your BIOS! :-)

1. Figure out what speed your terminal server wants to go, as well as the number of data, parity, and stop bits. 9600 is a common default, and the other parameters are often 8, N, and 1. Faster speeds generally mean it’s less annoying to work on them, but it has to be set the same on both sides, and you can go too fast for the cables you have.

You can verify the settings with “/usr/bin/screen /dev/ttyS0″ (as suggested by Greg in the comments), or /usr/bin/minicom (installed as the “minicom” package from Red Hat). If you ever used Telix for DOS you’ll be right at home with minicom. Hit Ctrl-A, then O to get to the configuration menu. Once it is set up properly you should be able to type in Minicom and have it appear on the terminal server, and vice versa. Don’t go on until you can do that.

/dev/ttyS0 is COM1, /dev/ttyS1 is COM2, etc.

From here on out replace 9600, 8N1, and ttyS0 in my examples with the right parameters for your setup.

2. Add the following to /etc/inittab, remembering to substitute the right serial port, and the terminal type you want:

# Serial Console Access
S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 9600 vt100

Have ‘init’ reread inittab by issuing the command “sudo /sbin/telinit q” and you should be able to see something via the terminal server. You might need to hit enter a couple of times to get its attention.

3. If you want to see stuff at boot, edit /etc/grub.conf. Add the following, substituting the proper serial port in “unit”:

serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal --timeout=10 serial console

(two lines, “serial” and “terminal,” if it wraps)

4. Comment out any line in /etc/grub.conf that starts with “splashimage.” The splash image doesn’t work so well with character-only interfaces.

5. Add “console=ttyS0,9600n8″ to the proper kernel entry in /etc/grub.conf. So your original entry:

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (2.6.9-67.EL)
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-67.EL ro root=/dev/sda1 rhgb quiet
  initrd /initrd-2.6.9-67.EL.img

becomes something like:

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (2.6.9-67.EL)
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-67.EL ro root=/dev/sda1 rhgb quiet console=ttyS0,9600n8
  initrd /initrd-2.6.9-67.EL.img

(that’s four lines if it’s wrapping)

6. Reboot and check it out. Party like it’s 1989.

If it isn’t working you’ll have to comment out the inittab line and “telinit q” again to free up the serial port, before you try Minicom or screen.

If I have messed something up here let me know in the comments. Thanks!

• Savage Love - January 30, 2008 | The A.V. Club
  “I am writing because I recently found out that my dad has a problem with online porn. My dad is clueless with technology, …it is really f***ing up our at-home system and embarrasses us whenever someone else uses the computer.” Answer given: use a VM.
• Bridge Tracker: Check the bridges you cross - Bridge Inspections - MSNBC.com
  Freaking cool tool to see the bridge status on a route.

I try to keep politics out of this blog (minus some comments/snarky remarks here and there) but FISA is a big privacy issue. Think Progress has a good post about the merits of the bill, so I won’t duplicate that. In short, the House is trying to restore some oversight to the process.

Here’s my senator, Russ Feingold, talking very frankly about FISA and the issue of privacy (it’s short):

I love that guy.

• Introducing Prologue « WordPress.com
  I wonder if there’s a way for me to integrate this into the way my group works… We have a sort of homemade Twitter system that acts as an in/out board.
• Emerson cranks voltage to 480 on server power distribution — Server Specs
  Seems like a small gain in the face of virtualization technologies.
• Music Blog Zeitgeist of 2007 / The Hype Machine
• Another DEMO ‘No, No’: The phrase “going forward…” « FoundRead
  “The first trouble with the phrase is that it’s almost always redundant. The sentence means exactly the same thing without it. If, on occasion, there is a need to spell out the idea of the future, we have some perfectly good words already.”
• Schneier on Security: Security vs. Privacy
  “And it’s precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China.”
• YUI: CSS Grid Builder
  This is cool for a guy like me who doesn’t want to spend hours dicking around with a CSS layout.
  (tags: revisit-webdesign)
• Mondrianum - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  A palette selection tool for Macs. I kinda forgot about kuler, I need to check it out again.
  (tags: revisit-webdesign)
• Organize: Data Center Cabling Masterpieces
  Holy crap, the second one (a disaster example) is amazing. Like, totally WTF.
• BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | South of Scotland | Honour sought for ‘Soldier Bear’
  “A campaign has been launched to build a permanent memorial to a bear which spent much of its life in Scotland - after fighting in World War II.” Weird!
• Jay Morrissey » The Art of Verbal Intimidation : Learn it and fight back!
  “With all matters of survival, if you don’t learn to fight, you will lose. Never instigate intimidation, but learn to fight back when somebody tries to intimidate you.”
• Cookthink
  A site that helps you figure out what to make based on what you are in the mood for, or what ingredients you have on hand.
  (tags: revisit-food)

• How to Work the Room « FoundRead
  Good tips for attending a gathering. Some are ones I’ve been practicing for a while and they work well.
• Top 15 Amazing Coincidences - The List Universe
  “The police demanded the original $600 to pass on to Fallon’s next of kin - only to discover that the new player turned out to be Fallon’s son, who had not seen his father in seven years!”
• Royal Pingdom » When data center cabling becomes art
  “We have posted pics of some truly messy data center cabling in the past, but this time we figured it was time to do the opposite: Show how some people have managed to organize cables into something close to art.”
• Server Monitoring Software - Capacity Planning and Reporting with Virtualization and Consolidation - uptime software
  I’m going to download this and try it out next week.
  (tags: revisit-software)
• Seth’s Blog: The last interaction
  “That free muffin at the restaurant or the lollipop at the barber or the call from the Realtor a week after the house is sold and contracts are signed and the movers have left… believe it or not, it matters.” Amen.
• RecipeSource: Cricket’s Spam Quiche
  Odd AdSense match in Gmail, but I like Spam, so I might have to try it.
  (tags: food)
• You Used Perl to Write WHAT?! - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
  “…most perl programs will run without modification even if they do advanced things such as database connectivity, file system modification or network programming.” Unless you depend on the CPAN, which is always a huge crapshoot.

I’m in New Orleans for a weekend of Mardi Gras parades. My friends Derick and Maitri graciously invited me down, and hooked me up with the Krewe of King Arthur. As a result I’m now the proud owner of a few thousand beads that I’ll throw from a float tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it.

Before yesterday I hadn’t even seen a Mardi Gras parade. I did get to catch the end of the Krewe of Cork parade, a walking parade through the French Quarter. After that we headed down to St. Charles Avenue to see the Oshun and Pygmalion parades. It was raining so hard, though, that Pygmalion rescheduled.

There are a lot of rules surrounding Mardi Gras parades. Some of them are city ordinances, some are Krewe rules. One of the rules for King Arthur is that everybody must have a mask or face paint on. So yesterday I walked into the French Quarter to find a mask shop. This is the first sign I saw after crossing Canal St.

I have to say that it is really a treat to be able to take a drink to go. Not very many places in the United States let you do that.

Enough for now, I have to go watch more parades. :-)

• The Pragmatic Bookshelf | List of Tips
  These are the tips from “The Pragmatic Programmer.” It is one of my favorite books. If you’re a system administrator you might read through and note exactly how many apply, not just to developers, but to us, too.
• Presenting at DEMO: 12 Do’s. 5 Don’ts. « FoundRead
  Good tips, not just for DEMO but for presentations in general. I absolutely agree with his five phrases you should never say, like “I guess that’s it.” I guess so. I guess I just wasted my time listening, and I guess I’m going to leave now…
• Ramak Fazel - Storefront for Art and Architecture - Art - New York Times
  “I can tell by looking at you that you’re not from Fort Wayne,” the officer replied. Mr. Fazel should practice the great American tradition of filing a lawsuit against each and every law enforcement agency that has harrassed him.
• High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi - New York Times
  Well, I guess that kills my desire for hamachi, or the canned tuna sitting in my cupboard.